1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a patient rehabilitation system, more particularly, a rehabilitation system utilized for rehabilitation and physical therapy of injured limbs and joints. To elaborate further, the present invention is a continuous passive motion exercise system with a driven monitoring device, utilized for reflecting on the state changes of the adhesiveness and the stiffness of patients' injured joints for monitoring their rehabilitation conditions, as well as for controlling the rehabilitation mechanism safely.
2. Description of Related Arts
Limb joints, such as knee joints, hip joints, elbow joints and wrist joints are all crucial mechanisms for humans to conduct various activities, including walking, running, jumping, standing, stepping up and down of stairs, dancing and track-and-field activities that require twists, turns or weight-carrying of joints. In view of the dynamics of a human body, since joints have to sustain most of the weight loading during bodily activities or motions, joints are susceptible to injuries, and abrasions with age, especially for knee and hip joints that carry most of the body weight. After being injured or aged, such joints sometimes have to be cured by replacing with artificial joints, so as to resume original functions.
After surgeries, a long period of rehabilitation therapy soon follows for fully recovery, which might take from a few months to half a year, and thus causes patients great inconvenience. One of the rehabilitation therapy is to maintain continuous exercise of joints to avoid adhesiveness among tendons, and to supply nutrition to joints. In such ways, this procedure enables joints to resume the normal range of motion as soon as possible, and thus shortens the period of time for patients to stay in hospitals or in beds. Therefore, clinically, the continuous passive motion exercise systems are widely utilized in rehabilitation procedures after patients with surgeries on joints.
The continuous passive motion exercise systems currently employed cannot provide information regarding the patients' conditions of rehabilitation such as their progress and the effect of their therapy. Thus, doctors or professional rehabilitation personnel may only rely upon past experience to make decisions to adjust rehabilitation procedures to befit each patient. General clinical rehabilitation procedures usually employ simple and generic processes for all, not being able to vary according to individual states. Furthermore, since continuous passive motion exercise systems engages patients' injured joints and move reciprocatively, to certain joint flexing or extension angles during exercises, patients might feel pain. Such exercise systems, currently available without being able to automatically adjust properly to suit patients' needs, can only be manually stopped by patients themselves. The pain caused by overbending, overextending or speeding can only be inspected and relieved afterwards. Such a drawback might cause secondary injury to patients.
In addition, joints with general joint diseases such as osteoarthritis, after surgeries, are likely to be stiff and cannot act well. Current exercise systems are not able to provide proper indices showing states of stiffness for joints, as well as indices for the evaluation of joint rehabilitation. Therefore, during rehabilitation, precisely and effectively monitoring and recording the degree of stiffness and viscosity for joints not only avoid any ill operations of exercise machines so as to protect patients from further injuries, but also provide doctors and patients with more rehabilitation information, thus, to enable more effective and speedy therapies.